What have I been reading this year… hmm lets see.
If there’s anything you need to know about me, its that I have a penchant for reading fantasy… my personal favourite brand of fantasy is not just an epic high fantasy, but something with African roots, a little genre I classify as my beautiful dark and twisted afrofantasy.
Why do I like fantasy, well, while some are quick to dismiss fantasy novels as just as literary escape, if you were to look past the magic and intricate world-building, there are fundamental truths, lesson and perspectives to be gleaned. Just because it does not read like a heavy book tackling all sorts of social commentary, awareness and consciousness does not mean a book is any less thought-provoking than others…
…and sometimes all we need is escape, the world can be such a bleak place, a dash of magic and colour in the pages of a book might just be what one needs to reboot.
**Click Images to open reviews
I started the year reading the much-anticipated sequel to Children Of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
Then I bumped into a scifi fantasy series by Tade Thompson titled The Wormwood Trilogy set in a fictitious town in Nigeria called Rosewater, riveting stuff that.
Then sometime during lockdown I was introduced to Nicky Dreydan and binge read all her books, whose genre range from afrofuturism to space opera
The Prey Of Gods
Temper
Escaping Exodus
As I write this I await the sequel to Escaping Exodus
And the last fantasy book I read whose title seems weirdly ironic after the death a socialist businessman who died in horror accident when his Rolls Royce Wraith crashed.
But it wasn’t all fantasy thanks to the Harare Book Club I also got to read the following titles some of which I don’t think I would have read.
The Kite Runner
On Black Sister Streets
Devil On The Cross
Kindred
My Sister The Serial Killer
And then what sort of friend would I be if I didn’t mention the poetry books my friends published:
Shades of Black By Edward Dzonze
LIPPA By Valentine Tusai
Oh and of course I contributed to MJ Mallon’s lockdown anthology titled This Is LockDown
And somewhere during Lockdown I also read a novel by Dean Koontz The Eyes Of Darkness, because number one I rather like Dean Koontz books and number two people kept quoting a paragraph from the book saying he had predicted a virus that would emerge from Wuhan…
…so of course how could I not read.
Read anything this year? What kind of genre is your go to book genre.
~B
PS currently reading The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell Namwali and literally just finished reading an Advance Reader’s Copy of Sue Nyakubaya–Nhevera‘s chapbook The Rivers We Cry coming out this December but available to preorder on Amazon
Becoming The Muse 
Your thoughts.. if you will?